Tony Hawk and the Bones Brigade Tell the Story of Legendary Skate Video ‘Animal Chin’

August 15, 2017 8:30 AMThe Bones Brigade mug for the camera at the Del Mar Skate Ranch in 1986 while wearing new team jackets.

The making of the most influential skate video of all time, with a little help from Jason Lee, Stacy Peralta, the Beastie Boys’ Mike D, and more.

Thirty years ago, Stacy Peralta, Tony Hawk, and the rest of the Bones Brigade released a gonzo skating video that was part marketing stunt, part experimental art project, and part guerrilla-filmmaking treatise. The film interspersed improvised sketches with some of the most beautiful skating the world had ever seen. Here, the original Bones Brigade members tell the story of the grainy VHS movie that changed skating forever, The Search for Animal Chin.

Building the Brigade

Stacy Peralta(Bones Brigade founder, ‘Animal Chin’ filmmaker): I had a dream of creating the world's greatest skateboard team, a team that was composed of truly gifted athletes. And what was really important was holding the team together over a long period of time so the members could develop and create something meaningful and lasting.

Alan “Ollie” Gelfand(Bones Brigade member, 1978–81, inventor of the ollie trick): There were a hundred people in the Bones Brigade over the years, but there's only a handful who stuck out.

Kevin Harris(Bones Brigade member, 1982-present): By '83 or '84, skating really started creating its own identity. More magazines were coming out, people were getting behind Tony Hawk and guys like that. It was a world of new tricks and new superstars in the industry, and it created a bunch of rock stars in the end. It was the dream team to be on—the same team as Rodney Mullen, Steve Caballero, and Tony Hawk. When I got asked by Stacy Peralta to ride for the Bones Brigade, it was a life-changing turn.

Lance Mountain(Bones Brigade member, 1983–91): Our group was just young enough, on the cusp, where we didn't have to go and get jobs. And we were going, “How can we figure this out to make this a living? 'Cause we don't want to give this up.”

Peralta: I looked for skaters who were hungry to win and hungry to progress, guys who knew how to take a fall and get back up. Tony certainly personified the type. Rodney was the same way, Caballero and McGill were the same way. These guys were all young and charged-up alpha males who were very eager to make names for themselves.

Rodney Mullen(Bones Brigade member, 1980–89): I think in terms of skating, what people were doing at that stage, everywhere you looked it was something new. And from that perspective, you could definitely make the argument that that was the most creative period in skating.

Craig Stecyk(street artist, ‘Animal Chin’ screenwriter/actor): Some people would tell you it was like the '26 or the '27 Yankees. It would take hours to break down why those two years were so different for the Yankees or why the Bones Brigade was different.

Mullen, a genius on any surface, styling in Sweden in 1985 on a decrepit wood ramp, in a pair of palmfrond print shorts for an audience of one.

A young Hawk nesting at home.

The Shoot

Mountain: At the point of Animal Chin, skateboarding was dying.

J. Grant Brittain(legendary skate photographer): All the parks were being bulldozed. At first we were all like, “What are we going to do?” But skaters, they built ramps, and then street skating came along. And you know, pools got emptied and ridden. Skaters have always just made do.

Mountain: Then VHS came out, and Stacy was just like, “We're going to make a video.”

Peralta: We thought it would be good exposure for our team, and good for business, and good for skateboarding. We had no idea that soon after the first video was produced 70 percent of the families in the Western world would own VHS decks.

Mountain: When Animal Chin came along and we were told that there was a loose script—and we had actual, perhaps, acting involved—we all were sort of unsure.

Tony Hawk(Bones Brigade member, 1981–92; “greatest skater of all time”): I think the pitch was “We want to do a video with a story line and highlight you guys' personalities.”

Steve Caballero(Bones Brigade member, 1979-present; king of the vert skaters): Yeah, that was kind of my idea, to have more acting and storyboard. We had already made two videos, Future Primitive and Bones Brigade Video Show, and Stacy was throwing around ideas of what we could do next. I said, “Why don't we do a story line, like searching for something or just going to different skate spots all over the place?” So Stacy came up with a storyboard, though a lot of the dialogue was improv.

Stecyk: Stacy will remember it differently, but he had a concept that it should be something like an ABC Afterschool Special, which I thought was brilliant. Satirical, you know? What a great fuckin' satirical base for the show. What a structure. For me, the more ridiculous it was, the better.

Pat Darrin(‘Animal Chin’ cinematographer): What it ended up being was The Endless Summer, but for skating.

Paul Gross(‘Animal Chin’ screenwriter): Skateboarding was getting a lot of pressure from local municipalities to basically go away. We were also aware that an awful lot of young skaters were growing up without a father figure in the traditional sense. So, in the course of one meeting, we decided to build a tape around an aging fictional skateboarding legend called Animal Chin.

Guerrero, king of San Fran street skating, chin-planting on the Chin ramp.

Stecyk: Of course no one remembers, but I was the one dressed up: I did the double for Animal Chin. Imagine your first day in San Francisco and someone decides they're going to dress you up as what looks like a Southeast Asian peasant.

Peralta: We essentially stole every single location we filmed at. At the time, I was shocked we got away with it, and I still am today. I can't believe we weren't shut down. It was one of the boldest and certainly one of the stupidest things I've ever done, far crazier than any backyard pool I ever recall sneaking into.

Darrin: It was done in the most elemental ways. A couple times we did some lighting, so we had a couple extra guys for that, but it was very, very modest. It was done with an inexpensive video camera.

On their quest to find Won Ton Animal Chin, the Brigadiers make stops at several hard-core skating spots, first in Hawaii at Wallows, then China Banks and the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, a backyard ramp in Bakersfield, and a seedy motel pool in the California desert, before finally catching up with lounge singer and underworld Chin expert Johnny Rad. The scene was supposedly set at Johnny Rad's Blue Tile Lounge in Vegas—actually a graffiti-bombed body shop in West L.A.

Skip Engblom(Z-Boys skate team founder): Well, you can't do much damage to a body shop.

Tommy Guerrero(Bones Brigade member, 1984–90): Johnny Rad's great. He was one of the best parts about that, in hindsight of course. At the time, we thought it was totally ridiculous. And we were laughing because it was funny. He was improvising all the words at that moment. You know, “Eggplant right now!”

Mountain: We had to film these Johnny Rad scenes from 2 in the afternoon till 10:30 at night, and then have to skate in the morning. We got bummed at stuff like that.

Darrin: They were whining and crying the whole time. “Oh, do we have to do this? Do we have to do it a second time?” They're all whiny. But after they saw the film, they said, “Aha, that's what it was all about.”

Hawk: Yeah, it would get monotonous and we would be difficult. Some stuff he wanted was hard for us to fake, like reactions to tricks: “Stand here and pretend you saw something awesome.” We weren't prepared for such a thing, nor did we sign up for it. But we learned to accept it.

Mike McGillI(Bones Brigade member, 1978-present; inventor of the McTwist trick): Stacy was always yelling at us to stop laughing, like, “Come on, guys! Get with it. We need to concentrate on this.” And that would make us laugh even more. We were like, “What?!” And he'd get so mad.

In a climactic sequence, our heroes stumble upon the mythical ‘Chin’ ramp, a multi-story wooden paradise of vert and coping. It was the first of its kind, a spine ramp with several extensions, essentially four or five ramps stitched into one another, including a mini-ramp on top of the platform. It would inspire a wave of imitation mega-ramps that would be the driving force behind vert skating's next evolution.

Brittain: You couldn't get away with it nowadays. You would have to have permits.

Darrin: Oh, we didn't have any kind of permits or anything. Are you kidding?

Brittain: You're talking enough lumber to build a couple houses. And at the time, it was the biggest ramp that had ever been built.

Mcgill: All the lumber was just dropped into this field.

Peralta: It took something like two weeks to build the ramp. And the day we began shooting, a middle-aged man drove out to the field, got out of his car, looked up at the two-story Chin ramp, and his jaw hit the ground. He had no idea who we were, or what the ramp was, or how any of this had come about. He wanted us out of there immediately. So I told the guy we were shooting a film to help at-risk youth, and that if he shut us down he would be contributing to the problem these kids face. He allowed us four days to shoot with the agreement that the ramp would be gone on day five.

Gross: The hardest part came when Stacy and I sat down to cut the tape. I think Stacy and Pat ended up shooting over 100 hours of tape for an hour-long video. We were able to use the original story we had written as a guideline, but editing ended up taking another six months.

Hawk peers through his future-of-skating goggles.

The Release

In May 1987, after a year of teasing the film with mysterious print ads in skate magazines and posters in skate shops across America, Peralta and the Bones Brigade premiered the 65-minute video at the Mayfair Theatre in Santa Monica. Over the years, it developed a reputation as the most influential skateboarding movie of all time.

Sean Mortimer(Bones Brigade member, 1988–94): The premiere was an event. A bunch of skaters dressed up. People wore clean clothes.

Harris: When I first saw Animal Chin, I was blown away by the skating talent and the filming talent that Stacy brought to the table, but I also walked away going, “Man, that was corny acting.” I didn't know how it would go over. I knew it was going to go over well in the skateboarding scene, but I didn't know that 30 years later it would still be an iconic video that people still want to see.

Johnny Rad(lounge singer, ‘Future Primitive’ and ‘Animal Chin’): We're winking at the camera. We're not here going, “Yeah, we're making art.” We were all in on the joke. I think that's what makes it charming.

Engblom:Animal Chin, in terms of videos and video production, was absolutely the high-water mark—that was the closest thing to a Hollywood production you could get. It sort of made anything anyone did after that seem cheap and unimaginative.

Brittain: I was at the premiere in Santa Monica, and I was pretty much blown away. It looked better than I thought it would. At the time, that was the best video ever made. I like it still. But Stacy doesn't even like it, I don't think.

Peralta: I have issues with the Chin video only in regard to the amount of “corn” that is in the video. It's such a corny story and told in such a corny way, and in that regard it's embarrassing to me as a filmmaker.

Shepard Fairey(artist, skater): My initial reaction to Animal Chin, being a 17-year-old too-cool-for-school skater kid, was: The skateboarding is amazing, but some of the skits are goofy. When I look back at it now, I appreciate the effort to have a story line and skits that allowed the skaters to display more of their personalities.

McGill, frontside at Del Mar in ’84.

The Style

Before ‘Animal Chin,’ skaters were seen as counterculture figures, often dressing in punk-inspired looks that included shredded jeans, bleached hair, and safety pins. But the Bones crew pioneered a new-wave '80s vibe. As Mountain says, “There's a lot of pink and neon and stuff going on. At some point we were just like, ‘Okay, tired of being punk.’ Not tired of it, but it was just like: Yeah, we wore pink shirts.” The point was to try new things, even if, as Mullen notes, they occasionally missed with “goofy stuff like A Flock of Seagulls haircuts.”

Caballero: Stacy let us wear whatever we wanted.

Peralta: One of the obvious aspects of identity within a culture is fashion: Fashion is how we indicate who we are and what our chosen affiliation is. As a kid, I was attracted to surfing not just for riding waves but also because I loved the look of its tattered fashion—it was subversive, not parent-like, ruffled and imperfect and not store-bought or collegiate, and it projected a message and a philosophy I could believe in and that I wanted to be a part of.

Mike D(skater, Beastie Boys co-founder): When Bad Brains started playing around, when Black Flag came and played their first gig in New York before Henry Rollins was even in the band, those were really important shows. And Minor Threat, those early Dischord records—we would see that they were wearing Vans, and we were like, “Shit, those guys skate, too.”

Caballero at home in California in 1987, showing how to blend punk and new-wave
style with a James Dean furrowed brow.

Caballero: I was wearing some pretty cool hairstyles, like I was bleaching my hair and I was cutting a flattop and putting it to the side. Just trying to be different. The bleaching of the hair definitely came from punk rock. I thought that would be kind of cool to wear and let people know that I was into punk, and I was also into Metallica. Wearing suspenders down kind of came from my punk history of wearing bondage pants.

Mike D: Stacy had Op shorts, and as a kid I really wanted them, and I literally had no idea where to get them in New York City. Later, there would be photos of us wearing the Thrasher shirts. Those you could get, because you could order them from the mag. Of course I was never, ever able to get those Op shorts, which is probably for the best. I would've looked like a total kook.

Stecyk: When Air Jordans went out of production, the original ones, we would go from burg to burg looking to find deadstock Air Jordans, 'cause we appreciated how they functionally worked—the ankle protection, the leather.

Jason Lee*(actor, former pro skater):* Sadly, I think everyone in the '80s suffered from a pretty terrible case of bad style, to a greater or lesser degree. But if skaters were wearing it, that made it cool. It was a fun time in skateboarding. And those guys were certainly setting trends in high school—probably mostly the Tony Hawk long-bangs hairdo.

Mountain: We went through phases where it was just horrible. You always see this. Everyone's individual, but everyone's a sucker. They're all trying to follow the trends. And it feels like everyone's doing this look today: Style is back to basically what I wore in Future Primitive and Bones Brigade Video Show. It's just Dickies and a T-shirt. High-waters are coming back.

Caballero ollies the gap on the Chin ramp while camera crew and McGill and Guerrero look on.

Caballero, one-foot backside skying over Mountain grinding into the channel.

The Legacy

Brian Eno famously said that while only 30,000 people bought the first Velvet Underground record, everyone who bought one started a band. ‘Animal Chin’ was like that. Street skating boomed, ramps went up, Tony Hawk built an empire with his skating video game. The sport was saved, and generations of kids found a source of inspiration, self-expression, and endless fun.

Mcgill: The impact of that video blows me away. Last week, I was in Brazil with Christian Hosoi, and the skaters were like, “Can you sign my Animal Chin video?” They had these videos from forever. They were saying, “Animal Chin, it changed my life.” And I can't tell you how many times people say that.

Rad: I go to conventions, and guys bring their kids up and they've got this almost reverential feel about them when they talk about Animal Chin, like, you know, “Oh, I grew up on that.” And some of the things said in the piece really do work, as far as being who you are and expressing yourself. So it's become somewhat of a legendary piece. I didn't see it coming, but it's awesome to be a part of it.

Guerrero: I have much more of a sense now than I've ever had of the impact that it made on so many people's lives. I get e-mails or comments just about every day about that era of skating and how it forever changed their lives.

Gross: We heard that a lot of municipalities backed away from skateboarding bans after someone in the local skate industry showed them the Animal Chin tape.

Mcgill: Last year this director called: “I'm filming a Justin Bieber video, and he likes skating.…” So I brought my son over there, and they filmed me skating. And then Bieber came over, and he's like, “Oh, such a pleasure to meet you.” He already knew who we were. He obviously saw Animal Chin. Even with our corny lines and whatever, people love it.